December 2015

December 29, 2015

Billed as “Back to Where it All Began,” David Amram’s program for last week’s engagement at The Theater for the New City, was a continuation of his 85th birthday celebration, a party that maybe began on his actual birthday in November, but knowing David, may never actually cease till his 86th. It was supposed to end at midnight, but was still going strong at 12:30 A.M. when folks of lesser constitution left the still packed room. That may be because the program was so content rich, with Amram’s greatest hits as a composer and performer for all these decades. A week later, the evening may still be in its infancy.

For a two-and half hour movie, the dialogue in Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s The Revenant could probably fill a page. The story, about a survivor of a bear attack seeking revenge in the American frontier, is all action, much of it brutal. The bear attack pits man against nature: a mother bear goes after the man, mauling him badly, but the landscape itself cold and harsh too seems a malevolent force for the Indians, trappers, and cavalry in these wilds in 1820. Leonardo DiCaprio, bearded as Hugh Glass, is not his usual handsome self but a primal force seeking out John Fitzgerald (an excellent Tom Hardy), the man who took what was most precious to him, and left him for dead. The acting is all in Leo’s eyes.

December 21, 2015

The Bolshoi Ballet, the very symbol of Russian culture around the world, gets a backstage look in the new documentary Bolshoi Babylon, to air on HBO on December 21. The film has made the rounds of festivals including DOC NYC in November, when I had a chance to talk to the filmmakers: Nick Read and Mark Franchetti, a journalist based in Moscow, a correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, said they had no interest in the Bolshoi before three years ago, when Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi’s artistic director, was attacked with acid outside his home. Three weeks later, a soloist, Pavel V. Dmitrichenko, was arrested for this horrific crime, ordered because of a casting decision: his girlfriend had been overlooked for the role of Odette-Odile in Swan Lake. The filmmakers came together to examine what this shocking incident said about the ballet, and Russia itself.

December 20, 2015

The eight gunslingers in Quentin Tarantino’sThe Hateful Eight really are hateful, so why do we like watching them so much, and so long, 3 and a half hours, give or take, including an overture and intermission. Not only can’t you take your eyes off them, you want to catch every word of Quentin Tarantino’s clever script. Utilizing the tropes of Westerns—he claims The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was a big influence-- Tarantino’s Western borders on horror, as the eight come together in a cabin in a snowstorm. Act I features a stagecoach: John Ruth (Kurt Russell), a bounty hunter, wants to bring his charge, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to Red Rock for hanging, and for the reward. Another bounty hunter, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), wants a ride. He wisely advises, better to bring her in dead. Driving past a Christ on the Cross, this company arrives at a storm hounded pit stop, and the rest of the bearded group: Bruce Dern, Tim Roth, Demian Bichir, Michael Madsen, and Walton Goggins. You might say, after watching these mesmerizing events, for these men crucifixion might be a blessing.

December 17, 2015

In the era of television, Susan Lucci reigns supreme. In Joy,David O. Russell’s latest movie, the Mangano household, an alternate universe of domestic dysfunction, Joy’s mom Terry has taken to bed, and to watching a soap with Lucci in the lead. A gun is an option for solving the soap’s operatic greed. In Joy’s story, life follows daytime drama. Joy’s menagerie includes her mom Terry (Virginia Madsen), dad Rudy (Robert De Niro), half sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm), her ex (Edgar Ramirez and her kids. She must provide. If a gun is on the table she’s going to pick it up, but it’s just the business we’re in. Keep your enemies close.

December 13, 2015

Steve Jobs, a biopic about the famed Apple founder starring Michael Fassbender, opened in early fall, and has been holding steady in the wake of the award season roll-out. Audiences will be taking another look at this excellent film now that Steve Jobs is getting some awards attention: Golden Globes, SAG, among them.

December 12, 2015

A film set in Auschwitz, Son of Saul is the one to beat for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. As this import from Hungary makes its rounds through the festivals, achieving accolades and nominations galore, a question arises: is it that juries favor Holocaust films, or is Son of Saul a really good film? Speaking to the film’s ingenuity, another question arises: how do you make a film set in the horror of genocide, where every image --like the pile of human bones-- is a cliché, and much of the nature of the place has been fetishized, or deemed better left to the imagination? What exactly do you see?

December 10, 2015

Like the comedy teams of old, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Fey and Poehler offer irresistible side splitting guffaws in Sisters, their new movie that opened this week at the Ziegfeld with a party at MoMA. The art museum’s lobby was transformed into a lavish party space with a tropical theme, echoing the party central to Sister’s plot: James Brolin and Dianne Wiest play parents, still vibrant and sexy; their late launching 40-ish daughters stage one last adolescent Animal House-style fling in their just sold family house in Florida. Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, Kate MacKinnan, and scene-stealing Bobby Moynihan pop up, providing SNL worthy laughs. The movie party gets raucous and raunchy, and the sisters grow up, sort of, in Paula Pell’s superbly riotous script that hones close to home. Pell’s parents came up from Florida for this premiere, attesting to truth in comedy.

December 08, 2015

It was compelling 20 years ago and even more compelling now: The O.J. Simpson story has not left the public imagination. FX has made a 10-part series called American Crime Story:The People v. O.J. Simpson based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book, to air in February. The two parts screened this week brought back the story, adding more to the historic events that ushered in the eras of tabloid news, reality television, with its volatile themes of domestic violence and race in America. There is no doubt: this will be another kind of sensation: a television drama of a drama that unfolded on television.

December 07, 2015

First the announcement: the kids in School of Rock bringing down the house at the Winter Garden Theater are playing their own instruments. As this rousing show hews close to the 2003 Richard Linklater movie on which it is based, everyone knows the terrain. Rock is freedom, man, and the joy of School of Rock comes from some brilliant casting: Alex Brightman’s Dewey literally channels Jack Black, and those kids are a force unto themselves. A concert musical in the end, it breaks the Broadway form in introducing the band by actor name. By that time you are out of your seat thumping the beat.